CFP: EACL 2012, 2nd CALL FOR TUTORIAL PROPOSALS

Proposals are invited for the Tutorial Program of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012), to be held in Avignon, France, from April 23 to April 27, 2012. The selected tutorials will be given on the Monday and Tuesday preceding the main conference (April 23 and 24).

EACL 2012 seeks proposals for tutorials in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include disciplines such as linguistics (including phycholinguistics and other subfields), speech, information retrieval and multimodal processing.

We particularly welcome (1) tutorials which cover advances in newly emerging areas not previously covered in an (E)ACL related tutorial, or (2) tutorials which provide introductions into related fields which are potentially relevant for the CL community (e.g. bioinformatics, social media, human language processing, machine learning techniques). In order to gather a widespread audience, the interest of the tutorial and the quality of the instructors will also be taken into account.

REGICA: New Artifact Rejection Methodology

This was originally posted on the Linkedin EEG Signal Processing group. If you are looking for new ways to reject ERP artifacts, you might want to check this out -> REGICA: New Artifact Rejection Methodology. Plugin for EEGLAB alongside with a complete dataset for artifact rejection studies are avaliable for download.

This plugin for EEGLAB implements the new methodology, proposed in [1, 2], namely REGICA. REGICA is an automatic methodology for EOG Artifact Rejection. REGICA assumes that the artifactual Independent Components (ICs) extracted by a BSS method include more ocular and less cerebral activity than the contaminated EEG signals. We thus propose to apply a regression algorithm to the ICs rather than directly to the recorded signals. Here is a link to an article explaining the approach used to detect artifacts.

JOB: Postdoc in Language (MEG/EEG) @ National Institute of Health

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in the Language Section, NIDCD, National Institutes of Health, to work on language, social communication, and relevant neurological disorders using MEG/EEG. The research will focus on discourse level language comprehension, production, and all aspects of natural ecologically valid language use. Investigations will be carried out in normal adults and clinical populations including stroke, traumatic brain injury and stuttering. Major experimental methods include MEG source analysis, time-frequency analysis and simultaneous EEG-fMRI.

JOB: Prof. of Sociolinguistic Variation Analysis @ Georgetown University

The Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University is pleased to announce a tenure-track position in Sociolinguistic Variation Analysis at the Assistant Professor level. We seek candidates who have a strong record of research and teaching in variation analysis, as well as more specialized expertise in sociophonetics and/or computational/corpus approaches to variationist sociolinguistics. The successful candidate will also have expertise in phonology or phonetics. Candidates should be prepared to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses. The appointment will start on August 1, 2012. Applicants must have completed all requirements for the PhD degree by the time of the appointment.

JOB: Prof. of Sociolinguistics @ Univ. New Hampshire

Assistant Professor, The Department of English, University of New Hampshire, invites applications for a full-time benefits-eligible Assistant Professor in Linguistics, contingent on funding, to begin September 2012. Applicants must have expertise in either sociolinguistics and phonology OR TESOL, as well as ability to teach lower-division general linguistics courses (Introduction to Linguistics; Intermediate Linguistic Analysis). The course load is 2/2.

CFP: Discourse-Pragmatic Variation & Change @ Univ. Salford, UK

18-21 April 2012

 http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/1581

Early quantitative sociolinguistics and quantitative corpus linguistics tended to neglect discourse-pragmatic features, i.e., linguistic items or expressions such as pragmatic particles, discourse markers, quotatives, intensifiers, general extenders, tag questions, etc. which are related by virtue of operating in the interpersonal and/or textual domains. It is only in recent decades that quantitative paradigms have witnessed a limited expansion in the study of these features. Amongst other things, these studies have demonstrated that the distribution of discourse-pragmatic features in the linguistic system is far from random, that changes in their usage and distribution are structured and principled, that many of their synchronic properties derive from the processes constituting grammaticalization, and that the social embedding of variation and change in their use may diverge from that of phonological or morpho-syntactic variables (see, for example, Aijmer 2002; Andersen 2001; Cheshire et al. 2005; D’Arcy 2005; Macaulay 2005; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2009). Yet despite the moderate upsurge in the quantitative study of discourse-pragmatic features, it is fair to say that discourse variation analysis is still at an embryonic stage (Macaulay 2002). There is little consensus in terms of methodology; analyses tend to focus on a few languages, a limited selection of variables as well as external constraints on variation; and quantitative studies of discourse-pragmatic change are often hampered by the shallow time-depth of synchronic corpora. These factors impede significant advancements and the formulation of a holistic theory of how discourse-pragmatic features vary and change.  

CFP: 13th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics @ Delhi, India

March 11-17, 2012
www.CICLing.org/2012

TOPICS:
All topics related with computational
linguistics, natural language processing,
human language technologies, information
retrieval, etc.

Around the web #14

Playing Galaga with your thoughts? NYT article on recent advances in ECoG.

Interesting blurb on word "choice" and perception of discrimination.

Latitude and "sunniness" of European capitals predicts Twitter laughter frequency in different languages. Over at NLP Confidential.

Company logos prime people for consistent behavior (e.g., WalMart logo -> less willing to spend money), but company slogans have the reverse effect.

Memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch: visual memory is enhanced for masculinised voices (lower pitch). The authors argue, that "the modulatory effect of sexual dimorphism cues in the male voice may reveal a mate-choice adaptation within women's memory..."

Fascinating article on how Whole Foods "primes" you to shop.

Mimicry of your conversation partner's body movements and gestures increases your attractiveness... unless money is involved.

The Deal Sea scrolls are now apparently in da' cloud.

We expect to hear a lot more people talkin' about g-dropping... links to original posts at Languagelog.

CFP: Fifth International Conference on Cognitive Science @ Kaliningrad, Russia

http://www.conf.cogsci.ru/eng/

The Interregional Association for Cognitive Studies (IACS), the Interregional foundation “Centre for the Development of Interpersonal Communication”, Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute” announce the Fifth International Conference on Cognitive Science, to be held in Kaliningrad (former Königsberg) , Russia, June 19-23, 2012.

The conference aims to organize a multidisciplinary forum for scientists exploring cognition and its evolution; intellect; thinking; perception; consciousness; knowledge representation and acquisition; language as a means of cognition and communication; brain mechanisms of cognition, emotion and higher forms of behavior. Psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, specialists in education, artificial intelligence, neuroinformatics and cognitive ergonomics, as well as other researchers interested in interdisciplinary research on cognition are invited to participate in the conference.

The conference program will include lectures by leading experts in multidisciplinary cognitive studies. Invited speakers are David J. Chalmers (Australian National University), Terrence Deacon (University of California, Berkeley), Daniel C. Dennett (Tufts University), Tom Givón (University of Oregon), Kimmo Kaski (Aalto University, Helsinki), Saadi Lahlou (Institute of Social Psychology, London), and George Lakoff (University of California, Berkeley).

JOB: Prof. Cognitive Science; Language Acquisition; Neurolinguistics @ Univ. of Texas, Arlington

The Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Texas at Arlington invites applications for the tenure-track faculty position of Assistant or Associate Professor in
Mind Brain and Education to begin in August, 2012.

Requirements include an earned Doctorate in Education or related field. We seek candidates who have a strong interest and ability to relate research to practice, a practical and theoretical understanding of current models and tools in the cognitive and/or neurosciences, and can contribute to the emerging field of Mind, Brain and Education (MBE). Successful candidates must have an established record of scholarly research, grant proposal writing, and
successful college teaching.

Responsibilities include conducting and disseminating research in the field of MBE, obtaining grants to support research and scholarly activities, developing and teaching courses in the new Masters in MBE, advising graduate students, and providing service to the profession.

JOB: Prof. of Cognitive Neuroscience @ Univ. of Delaware

The UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY invites applications for tenure-track Assistant Professor positions to begin September 1, 2012. Under some circumstances, candidates at the Associate Professor level might be considered. We are particularly interested in candidates who can bridge departmental areas and extend existing research strengths within the department. One priority area is Cognitive Neuroscience, broadly defined. We welcome applicants working in any area of cognition. A second targeted area is Neuroendocrinology / Psychoneuroimmunology. We prefer a colleague studying endocrine or immune physiology in relation to animal models of stress, sex differences, psychopathology, developmental disorders, psychosomatic disease, neurogenetics, social processes and health, or aging; applicants using other approaches to study these issues may also be considered. These positions, which could be based in any of the department's areas (Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical, Cognitive, Social), are part of a new departmental hiring initiative that reflects the arrival of a new department chair, an emphasis on a neuroscience perspective, and cross-disciplinary interaction. The initiative will bring additional faculty to our department, located in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. 

CFP: NIPS workshop on decoding, machine learning and neuroimaging @ Sierra Nevada, Spain

Submission deadline (EXTENDED): October 17th, 2011 

Modern multivariate statistical methods have been increasingly applied to various problems in neuroimaging, including “mind reading”, “brain mapping”, clinical diagnosis and prognosis. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) is a promising machine-learning approach for discovering complex relationships between high-dimensional signals (e.g., brain images) and variables of interest (e.g., external stimuli and/or brain's cognitive states). Modern multivariate regularization approaches can overcome the curse of dimensionality and produce highly predictive models even in high-dimensional, low-sample scenarios typical in neuroimaging (e.g., 10 to 100 thousands of voxels and just a few hundreds of samples).

However, despite the rapidly growing number of neuroimaging applications in machine learning, its impact on how theories of brain function are construed has received little consideration. Accordingly, machine-learning techniques are frequently met with skepticism in the domain of cognitive neuroscience. In this workshop, we intend to investigate the implications that follow from adopting machine- learning methods for studying brain function. In particular, this concerns the question how these methods may be used to represent cognitive states, and what ramifications this has for consequent theories of cognition. Besides providing a rationale for the use of machine-learning methods in studying brain function, a further goal of this workshop is to identify shortcomings of state-of-the-art approaches and initiate research efforts that increase the impact of
machine learning on cognitive neuroscience.


Decoding higher cognition and interpreting the behavior of associated classifiers can pose unique challenges, as these psychological states are complex, fast-changing and often ill-defined. For instance, speech is received at 3-4 words a second; acoustic, semantic and syntactic processing occur in parallel; and the form of underlying representations (sentence structures, conceptual descriptions) remains controversial. ML techniques are required that can take advantage of patterns that are temporally and spatially distributed, but
coordinated in their activity. And different recording modalities have distinctive advantages: fMRI provides millimeter-level localization in the brain but poor temporal resolution, while EEG and MEG have millisecond temporal resolution at the cost of spatial resolution. Ideally, machine learning methods would be able to meaningfully combine complementary information from these different neuroimaging techniques, and reveal latent dimensions in neural activity, while still being capable of disentangling tightly linked and confounded sub-
processes.

EEG and ERP Stuff

If you are interested in EEG and ERPs, the Online EEGLAB Workshop comprises materials for and videos from the 12th EEGLAB Workshop held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD), La Jolla, California, Nov. 17–22, 2010 (following the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego).

Also, check out the ERPLAB Toolbox, a set of open source, freely available Matlab routines for analyzing ERP data. It is tightly integrated with the EEGLAB Toolbox, and it operates from within the EEGLAB GUI. The suite of routines provide convenient methods for aggregating electrode channels, creating customized "bins" of conditions, filtering data, and artifact detection.

JOB: Tenure-track Prof. @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position in Second Language Acquisition with specialization in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or cognitive neuroscience of language, at the rank of Assistant Professor. The candidate must possess demonstrated strength in theoretical and/or experimental linguistics. The candidate's record should provide clear evidence of a strong research program and an excellent research trajectory. The successful candidate should demonstrate a commitment to excellence in teaching, and will be expected to contribute to both undergraduate and graduate instruction. Research specialty in one of the languages offered by the Linguistics department or another department in the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics is a plus, as is experience in second and/or foreign language teaching. The PhD should be in hand prior to the target date of appointment, August 16, 2012. Salary is commensurate with the experience and qualifications of the candidate.

CFP: Thirteenth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics @ Avignon, France

http://eacl2012.org/system-demonstration/index.html
Avignon, France
April 23-27, 2012

EACL 2012 features a special session for demonstrations. Topics of interest cover all aspects of computational linguistics, as outlined in the main conference call for papers. Demos will be presented at specific sessions from the main program of the conference. The demo track allows researchers and practitioners to demonstrate their new and innovative systems while interacting with their audience in an informal setting. Demo submissions should be concerned with mature systems or prototypes in which computational linguistics or NLP technologies are used to solve practically important problems. Demo papers should make clear which aspects of the system will be demonstrated, and how the system is used to solve practical problems. It should include a discussion of the implementation and case studies of how the system is applied.

Around the web #13

Linguistic variation: Twitter minus news (lexical frequency).

Digital music service Spotify is a blend of "spot" and "identify"... find out the origins of other hot startup names.

Here is the Year Two update to director Noah Hutton’s 10-year film-in-the-making that will chronicle the progress of The Blue Brain Project.

At what age do girls begin to prefer the color pink? At two years of age according to recent research.

Cool world map showing Flickr photo and Twitter tweets by frequency of geolocation tags.

Over at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, they have posted part IV of Linguistic Moments in the Movies.

Medical malpractice - In listening to a case about "incompetence," and "arrogance," and "dangerous decisions," jurors, "rather than fostering even an initial leaning against the doctor... message brought about a defensive response."

A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet... but apparently, wines that are not red, don't taste as "jammy."

Unless they are being watched, umpires show an ethnic bias in ballstrike calls.

What color is your  high back vowel?

Sentiment mining of New York Times articles predicts major world events.

The Virtual Linguistics Campus offers fully credited courses in a variety of linguistic classes.

Computational extraction of social and interactional meaning

Just returned from an excellent summer school on Language and Speech Technologies in Tarragona, Spain. I took a number of courses, including Information Extraction, Text Mining, and Computational Stylometry. Although all were quite good, one in particular stood out, Stanford professor Dan Jurafsky's course entitled "Computational Extraction of Social and Interactional Meaning." The course covered a broad swath of material from sentiment classification to prosody, emotion, & mood; from Alzheimer's to sarcasm.

In his lecture on personality and interpersonal stance, Jurafsky presented a study (currently under review) which, as a sociolinguist and software engineer, I found particularly interesting -- a study which used computational techniques for detecting friendly, flirtatious, awkward, and assertive speech in speed-dates. For those of you who don't know what speed dating is, check out the Date-a-palooza scene from 40 Year Old Virgin. I won't go too many of the details here, but the basic idea of the Jurafsky study was to develop a SVM classifier capable of predicting daters' affective stance towards their partners based on their speech.

They used a 20x20 design, in which 20 males had 4-minute "dates" with each of the 20 females over three different events, resulting in a corpus of ~60 hours of spoken data which was transcribed by hand to a corpus of ~800,000 words. A number of pre- and post-event survey were administered, and daters filled out questionnaires in between their dates. Numerous features were computationally extracted from the corpora including prosodic features (F0, intensity, turn duration, and speech rate), lexical features (negation, hedges, personal pronouns), dialog features (questions, back channels, appreciations, and sympathy), as well as features such as laughter, disfluent restarts, and interruptions.

I won't go into all of the results, but here are some of the key findings from this study: (1) when women flirt, they raise pitch ceiling, talk faster, say "I" & "like", use more hedges, and laugh at themselves; (2) when men flirt they raise their pitch floor, laugh at their date (teasing?), say "you" as well as "um", "I mean", and "you know"; (3) friendly people laugh at themselves and ask more questions; (4) awkward people also ask more questions, but they also hedge more as well; (5) assertive men talk more, use more negative emotion, and use less negation; and (6) assertive women use more negation and are less sympathetic.

If you want to read more about this particular study or are interested in some of the other courses, check out the lecture notes.

As an aside, I'm surprised at the lack of sociolinguistic studies using speed-dating as a source of production data (if you know of any, please let me know). It seems like a wonderful method - (a) the data is naturalistic discourse and (b) the participants are highly engaged in the task (i.e. they all volunteered because they presumably wanted to find a date). One of the primary difficulties, of course, is transcribing dates date conversations given all the other noisy "dates" taking place in the background. Any other pros/cons of this method?

JOB: Prof. of Phonology @ Brown University, Rhode Island, USA

Description: The Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Phonology beginning July 1, 2012. Research focus is open, but we especially value phonetically informed programs of research that cross traditional boundaries of topics and methodology and include cross-linguistic components. Applicants in all areas of phonology will be considered, but candidates whose research includes computational, developmental, and/or experimental approaches are particularly encouraged to apply. The individual filling this position must be able to teach introductory and
advanced phonology courses. Successful candidates are expected to have (1) a track record of excellence in research, (2) a well-specified research plan, and (3) a readiness to contribute to undergraduate and graduate teaching and mentoring. This is one of a series of language-related positions that we are seeking to fill; we anticipate conducting two additional searches in 2012-2013. Brown has a highly interdisciplinary research environment in the study of the mind, brain, behavior, and language; the Department will be moving into a newly renovated state-of-the-art building in the heart of campus in Fall, 2011. Curriculum vitae, reprints and preprints of publications, statement of research interests (one page each), and three letters of reference should be submitted on-line as PDFs to PhonologySearchbrown.edu, or else mailed to the application address below. Applications received by December 1, 2011 are assured of full review. All Ph.D requirements must be completed before July 1, 2012.

JOB: Professor of Cognitive Psychology @ James Madison University

he Department of Psychology is seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor to begin August, 2012 in Cognitive Psychology. The successful candidate will regularly teach Cognitive Psychology and periodically teach a senior seminar or graduate course in the faculty member's area of expertise. Preference will be given to individuals who are prepared to teach Statistics and/or Research Methods. Faculty are expected to develop an active program of scholarship that involves students in research. Supervision of honors projects and independent study projects are typical components of a faculty member's assignment. Faculty serve as academic advisors to Psychology Majors and contribute to service activities of the department and university. We also value other strengths that candidates might bring such as potential for contributions to our sociocultural curriculum or other diversity efforts, our M.A. in Psychological Sciences Program, the Alvin V. Baird Attention and Learning Disabilities Center, our interdisciplinary minor in Human Science, or experience teaching psychology courses not listed above. Demonstrated potential for obtaining external funding for research is also valued.

JOB: Professor of Linguistics @ UC Santa Barbara

The Linguistics Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to hire a specialist in discourse-based approaches to functional explanation for grammar. The appointment will be tenure-track at the Assistant Professor level, effective July 1, 2012.

Candidates' research should be based on a functionally oriented, empirically grounded approach to discourse and grammar, addressing the ways that language use shapes linguistic structure, and making significant theoretical contributions to the question of why languages are as they are. Candidates will be preferred whose research addresses the multidimensional nature of functional explanation, integrating insights from among the following areas: cross-linguistic and typological approaches to functional explanation for grammar; semantic and pragmatic motivations for grammar; historical change, evolution, and grammaticization; interactional functions and sociolinguistic variation of grammar; cognitive processing of grammar; use of innovative methodologies, such as current techniques for corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis; work with understudied language(s).

We are especially interested in candidates who show the ability to link the theoretical implications of their research to other subdisciplines in linguistics and to related fields, and to interact with colleagues and students across disciplinary boundaries at UCSB. Candidates must have demonstrated excellence in teaching, and will be expected to teach a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in both functional grammar and general linguistics.

JOB: Prof. of Social Psychology/Social Neuroscience @ Dartmouth, New Hampshire

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College expects to make a tenure track appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor (entry-level or advanced) effective July 1, 2012. Exceptional senior candidates may also be considered. We seek an individual who has exhibited excellence in research and is able to provide high-quality teaching at the undergraduate level and in the graduate program. We are particularly interested in someone who complements our strengths in self-regulation, social cognition, affect, and social neuroscience. The social area is one of three areas (along with behavioral neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience) in the department. The department is housed in a state-of-the-art research and teaching facility that includes a dedicated research MRI scanner for brain imaging research. With an even distribution of male and female students and over a quarter of the undergraduate student population are members of minority groups, Dartmouth is committed to diversity and encourages applications from women and minorities. Please send a letter of application, a curriculum vita, and arrange for three letters of recommendation to be sent via email to: Todd F. Heatherton (Chair, Search Committee) at social.psych@dartmouth.edu. Alternatively, paper applications may be submitted to Social Search Committee, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, 6207 Moore Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755. Review of applications will begin October 1, 2011 and continue until the position is filled.

Conference: Cognitive Processes and Social Factors in Language Variation @ Berne, Switzerland

Meeting Description: Cognitive Processes and Social Factors in Language Variation and Change
(Bern University, September 16-17, 2011) : http://www.csls.unibe.ch/content/workshop2011/index_ger.html 

The aim of the workshop is to bring together two traditionally distinct lines of research related to the study of variation in language use, one being concerned with social factors and the other one dealing with individual cognitive mechanisms. In this context, theoretical approaches and empirical results on the interplay of both sets of factors are of particular interest, e.g., the social modulation of cognitive processing in linguistic interaction, or the individual mediation of societal influences on language use.

The workshop is jointly organized by linguists from the Romance, Slavic, German and General Linguistics departments. It is intended as a small-scale 2-day meeting that brings together experienced and novice colleagues from different countries.

JOB: Prof of Cognitive, developmental, or social psychology w emphasis in neuroscience @ Univ. of Arkansas

The Department of Psychology at the University of Arkansas invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at therank of Assistant Professor, beginning August 12th, 2012. We seek candidates with a Ph.D. in psychology (or related field) whose research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive, developmental, or social psychology.

JOB: Postdoc (Pisoni lab) @ Indiana University, Bloomington

Description: **This is the second, modified posting of this announcement. Please note the change in deadline. The earliest start date for appointments is July 1, 2012 but the deadline for submitting materials for consideration is October 1, 2011.

The original announcement can be viewed here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-3230.html
Indiana University in Bloomington is pleased to announce the availability of four new NIH Postdoctoral Traineeships. Post-docs are available to qualified PhD's in Linguistics and related fields who wish to further their background and training in any of the following areas of basic and clinical research:

- Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition
- Acoustic and Articulatory Phonetics
- Laboratory Phonology
- Speech Production and Links to Perception/Action
- Perceptual, Cognitive and Linguistic Development
- Psycholinguistics
- Clinical Phonology and Sensory Aids for the Hearing Impaired
- Multi-modal Speech Perception
- Sociophonetics and Perception of Indexical Speech Information 

CFP: Australasian Conference on Speech Science & Technology @ Sydney, Australia

Date: 03-Dec-2012 - 06-Dec-2012
Meeting URL: http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/sst/index.htm 


Meeting Description: We are pleased to announce the 14th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST) 2012 to be hosted in Macquarie University, Sydney. The conference will bring together speech scientists, engineers, psycholinguists, audiologists, linguists and speech/language pathologists. Two workshops on speech perception and production will be organized.

Topics include:

Acoustic phonetics
Audiology
Clinical phonetics
Emotional speech and voice
Forensic phonetics
L1/L2 acquisition (production/perception)
Padegogical technologies for speech and singing
Phonetics and phonology of australasian languages
Sociophonetics
Speech engineering/modelling
Speech production/perception
Speech prosody
Speech technology applications
Speech synthesis/recognition 

Workshop on Field Recording of Linguistic Data @ Online URL

Bartlomiej Plichta is offering a free workshop on field recording: "Last year, we got together for a series of workshops in field recording of linguistic data, in acoustic phonetics, and speech synthesis. The workshops were very successful. I decided to offer the workshop(s) again this year. The 2-hour workshop is free and requires a computer with an Internet connection and Adobe Flash installed. More information can be found at this URL: http://bartus.org/akustyk/ws/ "

Conference: Indexing Authenticity: Perspectives from Linguistics and Anthropology @ Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany

A conference on "Indexing Authenticity: Perspectives from Linguistics and Anthropology" will be held at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany, on November 25-27. It will be centered around the following issues:

What does it mean to be ‘authentic’? Can authenticity ever be achieved? Is it a fundamental property of some entities or is it rather an element of attribution? How can sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists best define what it means to be authentic in language production? What properties can we assign to linguistic authenticity and from whose perspective is it evaluated? Whether it is planned or not, linguistic authenticity is assumed to be a common enterprise, in which the social functioning of authenticity is a driving force of individuals’ behaviour and is evaluated according to cultural contexts and mediated by and expressed in language. On the other hand, inauthenticity can be said to be the failure of indexing its ‘authentic’ counterpart or a speaker’s deliberate act while displaying socio-linguistic individualities and rejecting conventionalised speech behaviours.

JOB: Postdoc in Audiology and Deafness @ University of Manchester, UK

A post-doctoral Research Associate position is available to work with members of the Audiology and Deafness Research Group on an exciting MRC-funded project focussing on the development of an objective audiological test-battery. Applications are invited from researchers with a background in software development, signal processing, audiology, electrophysiology or other hearing related discipline. Knowledge of Matlab or C++, databases, data analysis skills, and excellent writing skills are essential. You should have a PhD or equivalent experience. You should also have good communication and organisational skills, be a team player, and have the ability to work independently and show initiative. You will be supervised by Dr Karolina Kluk, Prof. Chris Plack, and Dr Kai Uus.

JOB: Prof. of Phonology @ McGill University, Montreal, Canada

The Department of Linguistics, McGill University, invites applications for a tenure-track position in phonology at the rank of Assistant Professor, effective August 1st, 2012. Applicants should have a research agenda that complements the existing strengths of the Department. General qualifications are a PhD in linguistics and demonstrated excellence in research and teaching in the area(s) of specialization. Duties will include undergraduate and graduate teaching, graduate research guidance and administrative responsibilities.

Around the web #12

Pronoun use predicts whose health will improve the most... An interview with James Pennebaker.

Article at Wired discussing how "a 'unified' bottleneck may restrict our ability to perform very different cognitive processes simultaneously."

More on the brain computer interface - automakers test in-car brain sensors.

Semantic priming study shows that women who are "pursuing romantic goals" shy away from academic work in STEM disciplines.

Convergence of sociolinguistics and computational linguistics: using algorithms to detect "fake" product reviews - the fakes tend to use more superlatives and first person pronouns.

Super cool infographic shows the distribution of generic "river" terms across the United States. If Creedence Clearwater Revival had positioned themselves as New York rockers, I doubt "Born on the Slough" would have topped the charts.

Interesting piece on speech therapy for transgendered people.

The words "sexting" and "woot" (among others) now belong to the venerable Oxford Dictionary.

A new study suggests that phonological access skills may mediate some of the relationship between textism use and spelling performance.

Study showing that regional German accents (Saxon, Bavarian, and Berlin) resulted in lower perceived competence and hirability than standard German.

CFP: NIPS 2011 Workshop on Interpretable Decoding of Higher Cognitive States from Neural Data @ Granada, Spain Cognitive States from Neural Data

NIPS 2011 Workshop, Dec 16 or 17, 2011, Granada, Spain

Overview: Over recent years, machine learning methods have become a crucial analytical tool in cognitive neuroscience (see reviews by Formisano et al., 2008; Pereira et al., 2009). Decoding techniques have dramatically increased the sensitivity of experiments, and so also the subtlety of cognitive questions that can be asked. At the same time the mental phenomena being studied are moving beyond lower-level perceptual and motor processes which are directly grounded in external measurable realities.

Decoding higher cognition and interpreting the learned behaviour of the classifiers used pose unique challenges, as these psychological states are complex, fast-changing and often ill-defined. Contemporary machine learning methods deal well with the small numbers of cases, and high numbers of co-linear dimensions typical of neural data, and are generally optimized to maximize classification performance, rather than to enable meaningful interpretation of the features they learn from. And indeed recent work has succeeded to decode psychological phenomena including visual object recognition (e.g. Kriegeskorte et al., 2008; Connolly et al., 2011), perceptual interpretation of sounds (Staeren et al., 2009),  lexical semantics (Mitchell et al., 2008; Simanova et al., 2010; Devereux et al., 2010; Murphy et al., 2011), decision making during game playing (Xiang et al., 2009) and the process of mental arithmetic (Anderson et al., 2008). But for the cognitive scientists who use these methods, the primary question is often not "how much" but rather "how" and "why" the patterns of neural activity identified by a machine learning algorithm encode particular cognitive processes.

Why is the human brain shrinking?

During some recreational reading I ran across something remarkable: did you know that the human brain has been shrinking for the past few thousand years? Here's an interesting article on the subject:

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking

JOB: Postdoc in Language, action, and brain @ Hamilton College, New York

The Language, Action, and Brain Lab (http://lablab.hamilton.edu/) at Hamilton College is seeking a postdoctoral-fellow interested in understanding the organization of language and the brain from a more naturalistic social, developmental, and cognitive neuroscience perspective. We seek an individual who has recently graduated with a Ph.D. and who has experience with eye-tracking, high-density electroencephalography (EEG), and/or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and evidence of productive research. Applicants will be working with a large number of highly intelligent and motivated undergraduate research assistants. There is opportunity to work in collaboration with the nearby Center for Language and Brain (http://www.colgate.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/languageandbrain).

JOB: Research Faculty Position @ Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain)

The Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) offers research staff positions in several areas: language acquisition, production, multilingualism, neurodegeneration of language, language and learning disorders, neurocognition of language and advanced methods for cognitive neuroscience.

The Center promotes a rich research environment without teaching obligations. It provides access to the most advanced behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, including 3 Tesla MRI, a whole-head MEG system, four ERP labs, a NIRS lab, a baby lab including an eyetracker, two eyetracking labs, and several well-equipped behavioral labs. There are excellent technical support staff and research personnel (PhD and postdoctoral students). The positions have a term of appointment between 3 and 5 years with the possibility of a tenure track.

JOB: Assistant Prof. of Social Neuroscience @ Univ. of Chicago

The University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, is seeking to make a faculty appointment in Social Neuroscience at the Assistant Professor level. For information about the Department and faculty seehttp://psychology.uchicago.edu/index.shtml. Applicants must apply online at the University of Chicago's Academic Career Opportunities website http://tinyurl.com/5wqnrvm. Applications are required to include 1) a brief cover letter, 2) a current curriculum vitae, 3) a statement of research interests, 4) a teaching statement and 5) a representative publication or manuscript. In addition, applicants are strongly encouraged to submit, as optional, up to two published or unpublished research papers. Also, three letters of reference are required to be submitted online. Ph.D. must be in hand by start of appointment as Assistant Professor. Review of applications will start on October 17, 2011. Early application is encouraged. The application process will continue until the position is filled or until the application deadline of March 31, 2012.

JOB: Prof. of Cognitive and Brain Sciences @ Tufts University

The Psychology Department at Tufts University is seeking applicants at the assistant, associate, or full professor level for a position in Cognitive and Brain Sciences, broadly defined, to begin September 2012. Although area of specialization is open, we are especially interested in applicants who could contribute to our new interdisciplinary undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in this area. In this regard the successful candidate should have research interests that bridge to those of other members of the program and have an active research agenda capable of supporting extramural funding. In addition, applicants should be willing and able to teach introductory and advanced courses in their interest area; contribute to quantitatively oriented laboratory, statistics, and/or research methods courses; and contribute to our Ph.D. program.

Workshop: Methods for Studying Human Cerebellar Structure and Function @ SFN Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD

Nov. 10-11, 2011
“Methods for Studying Human Cerebellar Structure and Function” is a 2-day workshop for investigators with an interest in applying modern anatomical and physiological methods to the study of human cerebellar function.

Presentations will cover the principal methods currently in use to study human cerebellar function, including: (1) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of cerebellar structure, (2) transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation as a neurodisruptive probe of cerebellar function, (3) task-related functional MRI studies of cerebellar function, (4) functional MRI connectivity studies of cortico-cerebellar loop organization, (5) MRI meta-analysis approaches, (6) use of computational models, and (7) focal and neurodegenerative lesion analysis of cerebellar function.

JOB: Postdoc @ University of Kent

The School of Psychology at the University of Kent (www.kent.ac.uk/psychology<http://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology>) is seeking to appoint a full time Research Associate on a fixed term contract for 3 years, under the supervision of Dr Heather Ferguson.

The successful candidate will assist with study design, preparing experimental materials, conducting the proposed research, statistical analysis, and writing up the results for publication in academic journals. The research topic itself focuses on the concepts of perspective-taking, communication and language processing, thus a firm grounding in these topics is highly desirable. All studies in the project involve eye-tracking methods, particularly making use of the 'visual world paradigm' to examine how expectations of others' utterances unfold over time. It is expected that the successful applicant will have a strong research background in conducting and analysing data using these methods, preferably with experience using EyeLink trackers and software.

Salary: ?30, 870 rising to ?32,751 by year 3
Closing date for applications: 26 September 2011
Interviews are expected to be held: week commencing 10 October 2011

Please see attached for full details of the post and seehttp://jobs.kent.ac.uk/fe/tpl_kent01.asp? to apply for this post. Additionally, informal enquiries are welcomed by contacting me directly (h.ferguson@kent.ac.uk<mailto:h.ferguson@kent.ac.uk>).

Many thanks,
Heather


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Dr Heather J Ferguson
School of Psychology
University of Kent
Keynes College
Canterbury, Kent
CT2 7NP